How the village of Kasibo in Zimbabwe reinvented itself

Soon after getting her child ready for school, Gertrude Moyo heads to her village’s community field. It is a routine she has grown accustomed to over the past few years. The field in the village of Kasibo, in the Hwange district in western Zimbabwe, has become her workplace; it provides the vegetables her family needs.

Just a few years before she started growing vegetables, the 43-year-old had almost given up hope of earning a living in Kasibo. There had been several successive years of drought, which, for many villagers, was a clear sign of climate change in a region already characterised by low rainfall and high temperatures. “The situation was dire. I couldn’t sustain my family through farming,” Gertrude Moyo recalls.

The main economic sectors in the Hwange district include coal mining, nature conservation and tourism. However, the majority of the population relies on agriculture to make a living.